Our information age more often feels like an era of information
overload. Excess amounts of information are overwhelming; raw data
becomes useful only when we apply methods of deriving insight from it.
Fortunately, we humans are intensely visual creatures. Few of us can
detect patterns among rows of numbers, but even young children can
interpret bar charts, extracting meaning from those numbers’ visual
representations. For that reason, data visualization is a powerful
exercise. Visualizing data is the fastest way to communicate it to
others.
Of course, visualizations, like words, can be used to lie, mislead, or
distort the truth. But when practiced honestly and with care, the
process of visualization can help us see the world in a new way,
revealing unexpected patterns and trends in the otherwise hidden
information around us. At its best, data visualization is expert
storytelling.
More literally, visualization is a process of mapping information to
visuals. We craft rules that interpret data and express its values as
visual properties. For example, the humble bar chart in Figure 1-1 is generated from
a very simple rule: larger values are mapped as taller bars.
Figure 1-1. Data values mapped to visuals
More complex visualizations are generated from datasets more complex
than the sequence of numbers shown in Figure 1-1 and more complex ...
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